Borty The Bort:"It makes wonder how is it that adults are not trusted to make choices about video games, and yet they are allowed to vote?"

You know, from what I hear of the Australian Government, I wouldn't be surprised if their response was "Yeah, why do we allow people to vote?" and then prevent people from voting.

Yeah, nah mate. Actually the opposite since we've got compulsory voting here, and there was talk very recently about lowering the voting age to 16.

Honestly, the only time our federal government gets all paternal is over media censorship (state governments are a completely different matter, ask me about NSW lockout laws sometime). Movies went through the same problems until very recently (about fifteen years ago). I remember a bunch of critics holding an illegal screening of a film refused classification at the Sydney film festival, getting dragged out by the cops.

The biggest problem right now for video games in Australia is that we have no mainstream champions. Senator Leyonhjelm is an accepted nutjob who only got elected because people confused his Liberal Democratic Party with the Liberal Party on our absurdly enormous Senate ballots. His little speech on video game censorship wasn't considered worth a mention in any major news or political publication. It was a complete non-event, not news-worthy and not even worth mentioning on the Escapist, and quite frankly the Senator himself cares a lot more about the right of people here to buy lever-action shotguns.

Right now the people who matter, people in Australian film and television, are a bunch of dinosaurs who don't understand video games or the scope of the audience. These are the people who are supposed to care about media censorship in Australia, and they do not give a single shit. Until we get people who actually matter to care about the cause, nothing is going to change.

And truthfully there's no great call for things to change. Hasn't been since a certain Attorney General of SA retired, and we had a specific enemy to rally against. Got other things to worry about. Like housing affordability, racial discrimination laws, marriage equality, the complete lack of a real energy security plan, and those fucking NSW lockout laws (stupid fun-hating NSW government bastards).

Given the premium Australians are paying to get their games anyway, it's more than a little surprising to imply that there's a significant pool of children who are getting their games without their parents or guardians acting as some kind of intermediary.